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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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A new ANSI/ANS standard for liquid metal fire protection published
ANSI/ANS-54.8-2025, Liquid Metal Fire Protection in LMR Plants, received approval from the American National Standards Institute on September 2 and is now available for purchase.
The 2025 edition is a reinvigoration of the withdrawn ANS-54.8-1988 of the same title. The Advanced Reactor Codes and Standards Collaborative (ARCSC) identified the need for a current version of the standard via an industry survey.
Typical liquid metal reactor designs use liquid sodium as the coolant for both the primary and intermediate heat-transport systems. In addition, liquid sodium and NaK (a mixture of sodium and potassium that is liquid at room temperature) are often used in auxiliary heat-removal systems. Since these liquid metals can react readily with oxygen, water, and other compounds, special precautions must be taken in the design, construction, testing, and maintenance of the sodium/NaK systems to ensure that the potential for leakage is very small.
James N. Anno
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 16 | Number 4 | August 1963 | Pages 357-362
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transient-temperature behavior following a step change in internal heat generation has been analyzed to determine the power generation in the Battelle Shielding Facility fission plate. The fission plate is employed for shielding studies as a radiation source with a fission energy distribution. The plate is a 28-in. diam, 0.0199-in. thick uranium disk containing 3741 gm of uranium enriched to 93.14% in the uranium-235 isotope. It is plated with 0.0007 in. of nickel and clad with 0.025 in. of aluminum on each side and is in intimate contact with a 0.25-in. thick aluminum plate on one side. Ceramic spacers provide airgap insulation of the fission-aluminum plate combination from the surrounding media. Resistance thermometers were employed to observe the transient-temperature behavior following a step change in the internal heat generation in the plate for fission heating and for cooling tests. The cooling curve data were strictly exponential and rendered a decay constant of 0.0517 min−1 which was utilized, along with the physical constants of the assembly, to render a solution to the transient-heating equation and an estimated power of 25.0 ± 0.6 watts.